The government should take immediate action to help those struggling with energy bills this winter, the suppliers’ trade body has said.<\/p>\n
Energy UK said domestic gas prices, which rose on Thursday, and forecasts of steep rises in January meant inaction would lead to a longer-term, more costly and deeper crisis.<\/p>\n
Figures revealed by the BBC earlier this week showed forecasters predicting a 16% rise in domestic energy prices in the new year for 20 million households on variable tariffs affected by regulator Ofgem’s price cap.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government was considering any measure that took the pressure off.<\/p>\n
Households in England, Scotland and Wales on variable energy tariffs set by Ofgem’s price cap, which puts a maximum price on each unit of gas and electricity, were hit with a 4% price increase at the start of October.<\/p>\n
That is the equivalent of about \u00a360 per year – or \u00a35 per month – taking an annual bill to \u00a31,723 for the typical household using both electricity and gas and paying by direct debit if this level was sustained for a year.<\/p>\n
But forecasts show a far greater increase is possible for bills in January. Consultancy Cornwall Insight said its latest forecast suggested the same typical annual bill would rise to \u00a31,999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The government should take immediate action to help those struggling with energy bills this winter, the suppliers’ trade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-790388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}